FIVE FINGER DEATH PUNCH · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Bad Company

The beat the song is built on is a 2-bar phrase, played through bars 8, 12-14 and 42, and 4 more places -- 17.6% of every bar the kit plays. This one moves around more than most: the beat is where to start, not the whole job.

TEMPO
114 BPM
TIME
4/4
BARS
98
LENGTH
3:26
DIFFICULTY
60/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 114 BPM
BAD COMPANY · BARS 12-13

It is played on crash, snare, mid tom, floor tom and kick, counted in thirty-second notes. On its own it scores 45 out of 100 -- a step up -- and the thing that decides that is how fine the subdivision is.

The whole song is 60 out of 100, so the beat is not the hard part: what costs you is everything around it, the joins and the fills.

How to get it under your hands

The room opens this beat on its simplest reduction, at 86 BPM, and adds the notes back a rung at a time -- 3 of them. Nothing is a matter of opinion: each rung has a tempo to reach and a gate to pass before the next one.

  1. Skeleton. Only the notes that land on a beat. The point is to feel where this bar stands.
  2. Kick and snare, whole. The feet and the snare exactly as written, and nothing else. This is the part to know by heart.
  3. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 86, 100 and 114 BPM, and the gate at each one is 8 loops in a row with no wrong note and no wobble in the time.

PRACTISE THIS BEAT →

Questions

What drum beat does Bad Company use?

A 2-bar phrase on crash, snare, mid tom, floor tom and kick, in 4/4 at 114 BPM, counted in thirty-second notes. It is written out above, and it covers 17.6% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 8, 12-14, 42 and 46-53, and 3 more places. The time is kept on the silence to start with, and it changes 9 times over the song.

Is the beat in Bad Company hard?

45 out of 100 on its own -- a step up. The song as a whole is 60 out of 100, a step up from a first song, and the work is in the independence between the hands and the feet.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 98 BARS ANALYSED